The Linemakers

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Leading up to football season we will be offering a few pieces of advice for those inclined to put a few bets down on your favorite pastimes. We'll tell you what type of bets offer the most value, and what type of bets routinely give a Las Vegas sports book the most trouble. We'll also share with you information about books' biggest moneymakers and which bets you may want to stay away from. We'll start this week with futures.

LAS VEGAS -- If you walk into a sports book and see that its future odds for any sport has seven teams listed in single digits to win a championship, walk out. You don't want to do business at a place that offers its customers a terrible theoretic hold on futures, or one of 45 percent or higher.

One of the least understood bookmaking aspects among a few Vegas oddsmakers is how to handle futures. A book should rarely lose on futures. When a champion is crowned in any sport, the book should consider the winnings a present for all the hard work put into the season of booking individual games. Sometimes, even when a book's screen shows a 45-percent hold, they'll win up to 60 or 70 percent of the total handle if one of the preseason favorites wins a championship.

Some books fail to stay on top of things, such as a baseball or basketball team getting hot, which turns its odds stale and creates an attractive opportunity for sharp players. If that team wins the championship and the book gets burned on its futures, they get gun shy about their next offering and lower their theoretic hold even more.

The perfect example of sports books falling asleep at the wheel came in 2011, when the Cardinals were offered at 500-to-1 to win the NL Pennant and 999-to-1 to win the World Series in early September when they were several games behind in the wild-card race. But the Braves got cold and the Cardinals remained hot, and St. Louis made the playoffs and went on to win several dramatic games to win the NLCS and, eventually, the World Series.

Several Vegas shops showed severe losses on their futures books due to St. Louis that year. They tried to maneuver -- raising them high -- with the hopes of getting any last-minute money they could on the Cardinals before they were eliminated, but they got torched in the process. This forever changed the books' approach to handling futures.

Six-figure losses don't get swept under the rug. That's when casino executives, who don't necessarily understand sports betting, get involved and say, "Do whatever you have to do to not lose again." The strong-willed sports book director who has the respect of his bosses can defend his side and pass it off as just one of those freak things that happens in the business.

Others, who are grilled by the bean counters about win/loss on a daily basis, are forced to give in and be ultra-conservative, which leads to posting even more embarrassing odds that do far more damage to a casino brand than losing an occasional big bet.

When a sports book gets into that mode where they don't want to gamble or offer the best odds on any future, things get really bad. Some of the tactics we've seen in town have been lowering odds on a couple teams without raising others, or lowering risk limits to the point where sometimes a bettor can't even get $100 down on team because of a potential payout of more than $5,000.

There are a few sports books in town that do a terrific job of being conscience about what their theoretic hold is on all their futures, trying to maintain about a 30-35 percent hold on indexes with 30 or more options. And because they're trying to be fair to their betting public, they have to be one step ahead of sharp bettors that are always lurking for value. They have to analyze what every win and loss means to each team and adjust accordingly. The entire bookmaking team across all shifts has to be in sync with this process -- or it fails.

If you want to place a futures bet on a team in Las Vegas, the best thing to do is shop around for the best number. But before walking out of the book that has seven teams listed at single digits, scan down the list to see if there are any nuggets on which someone might have fallen asleep. Some books don't put in as much time on their futures because they figure they are already offering the worst odds and there shouldn't be too much to change. But sometimes hot teams fly under the radar, and their value exceeds what the less effective futures book had posted the week prior.